Cornerstone’s PiiQ is an SMB offering formerly known as Sonar6. PiiQ is aimed at small-to-medium sized businesses and includes core learning management and performance management systems, including content creation, mobile accessibility, and in-product reporting.
$8
per user per month
PerformYard
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
PerformYard, headquartered in Arlington, VA, providesperformance management software aimed at providing features for HR and a simple employee experience. It offers HR teams tools to build out any performance management strategy so employees get a streamlined experience so they can focus on quality feedback and effective performance discussions.
Perform Yard is best suited for business managers to monitor the performance of their employees, set and review goals as well as implement performance improvement plans. It’s not so ideal for small groups. The precise questions asked of the employees makes it perfect for the responses to paint the overall picture of the progress and production of the employee, and helps supervisors really gauge the output from their employees. Overall, it is a great tool to utilize for monitoring employees progress, as well as evaluate the employee at your end to assist with setting goals for the new year.
Enables employees to draft work goals and collaborate with their supervisors on a final version - improves mutual understanding right up front.
Combines performance goal ratings with competency ratings and provides a blended score. Simplifies the goal weighting so you don't have to do any calculations.
9-box matrix provides useful definitions and descriptions so managers can prepare development notes or plans for individual employees.
Customer Service! The service support is unmatched compared to other vendors! Our rep is nothing short of amazing with her timeliness, helpfulness, and ability to navigate the issues we encounter!
Streamlining automated reviews - Effortlessly send out a whole years reviews in one sitting!
Auto updating from our HRIS system - Automated SFTP integration with our HRIS system to auto update employee fields and keep the system up to date with less manual process!
Would be good to have have a virtual "top level" (eg board) user built in to allow senior execs without a direct manager to be able to be set up with KPIs instead of having to create a dummy user
Reports have difficulty downloading if pop ups disabled or in some browser environments
When competencies are updated while a cycle is open, any changes don't effect that open cycle but only future ones. Would be nice to be able to have the option to apply changes to existing "open" cycles
Don't really need to have multiple team member selection options in the dashboard. Would be more efficient to drill down from the team member selected rather than have to scroll through the list amongst all other team members data files.
Would be nice if contributors could also opine as to the perceived level of performance for the person they are commenting on, i.e., unsat, sat, excellent.
It's not that CSB isn't a decent performance management system, but we have decided to go with just one vendor (Workday) for an HRIS/performance management/payroll system so we can directly relate pay to performance. We are more interested in having just one system that "talks" to the other pieces instead of having to work with several vendors. It reduces the hassle of having to communicate with different support teams, having different contracts, and so on.
It has been excellent among the employees. It is a great way to keep up with the tasks and goals throughout the year. Manager/employee communication can increase with this program. It is very easy to use and understand. Navigation can be a bit tricky but the overall ease of going through it is splendid.
There are specific things within the goals and competencies that are user-friendly. For example, the rating slider isn't great in my opinion. You can slide in between ratings which can create some odd scoring (if you use scoring). It seems a better solution would be a drop down where you select your rating. There are also some glitches in the system and have been told Cornerstone is aware of them but are focused on delivering new features. There are workarounds, but that doesn't seem to be a great answer.
This is one of the best features of PerformYard - it is extremely easy to use and intuitive. There was no learning curve. This is what is so phenomenal about PerformYard. Their layout, while offering so many features, is extremely simple.
The saving process slows it down. It doesn’t auto save. If you leave a page, it will sometimes warn you, but not always. When you hit the save button, a window pops up that says creating/saving packets. It feels very archaic.
My assistant could better address this issue. My perception is that there is not immediate assistance, and that there can be a wait for help. That is not a negative, just a perception. I have not used support in two years.
The support from PerformYard is unmatched when compared to other systems I have worked with. Not to say that the support personnel always have an immediate answer, but they are so committed to solution and timeliness that it is not long before we are able to work through any issues. Emails are quickly returned for ease of access, and they never fail to offer to hop on a call and visually walk through something if that may help the issue!
Training for PerformYard was fantastic and very easy to understand! I highly recommend this product to any company. It is super helpful for communicating with staff, for keeping track of your goals, tasks and reviews for the current (or past) year. Definitely get online training for implementation. You won't regret it!
I think we could have done a better job of rolling out the tool to our managers. We were under a tight timeline. In the training, we showed them everything and said go do it by this date. Looking back, I would have done it in pieces: for example, 2 weeks to write goals, 2 weeks to get sign-off from direct reports. I just let them go at it. Since then we’ve moved to agile development environment and are applying the technique to everything. In future would only do through change sprint. It is a big change I didn’t take it seriously enough.
I had a team of 3 project managing. You need a champion from every department to make sure you’re getting it right and to make sure what’s happening is communicated. It’s not something you can do without input from department heads
Our Human Resources department handled the implementation of PerformYard and they did a fantastic job. A tutorial was sent out via email to all employees with a requirement of viewing it. In additionto that, a ZOOM session was scheduled so that any questions or concerns could be answered after viewing the tutorial.
Lesson.ly has been great to work with but it is a very clear and simple, user-friendly system that anyone can pick up with very little training as it is self-explanatory. It also has a great mobile interface and lots of different features that are easy to add for the admin but really impactful for the user.
PerformYard is much more specialized for feedback, where the rest seemed to add it as a lesser feature. I wanted a tool that’s built around making it easier to both give standardized feedback as well as receive and review it. This has helped streamline our practices and inspection on completion is easy as well.
It's tool and it's only as good as the person wielding it. The investment in PiiQ was accompanied by a quarterly cadence and manager feedback training. We feel like our employees are given regular feedback and bonuses are tied to objective accomplishment.
It has encouraged me to actually complete goals rather than "almost" complete them because I want to be able to check off the box.
Sometimes it's difficult to track goals without clear metrics, however, this might be a positive thing because it encourages the user to create metric-based goals.
One positive impact is the impact this program has on extrinsically motivated employees.
